Box office betting: Running Trend Exchange thread

Soon enough, you'll be able to literally bet on the performance of movies. It's called Trend Exchange, and it's brought to you in part by the folks of Cantor Fitzgerald (the WTC-based company nearly wiped out by 9/11).
People here in Hollywood -- most of whom hate the idea -- expect it to be up and running in time to bet on Iron Man 2. I think that's unrealistic, but it could be going by the Fall.

And we've all been long laboring under the delusion that bookmaking was illegal.

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I used to be a trader on the NYFE -- the New York Futures Exchange. It was/is a minor league futures exchange, that at the time was owned by the NYSE. (It was later sold to the New York Cotton Exchange, which in turn became the New York Board of Trade when it merged with the Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange).

We traded stock index and commodity index futures on the floor at 4 World Trade Center.

At one point, the price of our seat fell to just a couple of hundred bucks.

Trading volume was pretty low, so my suggestion was to bus in tourists; sell 'em a seat; give 'em a little bit of training; and throw them in the ring.

It would have been great. Why send them all to Atlantic City when they could have blown their money in an actual trading pit?